


waves

by tomorrowsrain



Category: Do No Harm (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Study, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Magical Realism, Torture, Violence, very vague magic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-01
Updated: 2017-04-01
Packaged: 2018-10-13 18:36:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,917
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10519491
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tomorrowsrain/pseuds/tomorrowsrain
Summary: He was born different. During a storm, his mother says. His abuela always insists that doesn’t mean anything. Signs, superstitions. Nothing more. Storms don’t herald what is in his blood. It came quietly and it lingers, just beneath the surface where no one else can see.





	

**Author's Note:**

> So I have no idea what this is. I have no idea how I even got here. I haven't even seen this entire garbage show, just the LMM supercut by trick-please and somehow I got way too invested. Honestly, I have so many other things I should be working on but I spent all of today writing this and it's ridiculous. I'm ridiculous. 
> 
> Regardless, though, if anyone does decide to read this, I hope you enjoy this strange product of my strange brain. 
> 
> Opening quote is from the song Yesterday Was Hard On All Of Us by Fink. I listened to Waves by Mattia Cupelli while writing this, hence the title.

 

 _Where do we go from here, where do we go?_  
_And is it real or just something we think we know?_  
_Where are we going now, where do we go?_  
_'Cause if it's the same as yesterday, you know I'm out_  
_Just so you know_

 

**_ _**

The plane feels alive around him, humming low and angry like a sleeping beast. He focuses on it: the coarse fabric at his back, the cool of his drink against his fingertips, instead of the racing beat of his own heart. The terror gnawing at the back of his skull.

Next to him, Ian is sleeping. Or pretending to be.

Two hours until they land in Montego Bay. If he looks just a hair to right, he feels like he might be able to catch a glimpse of Death occupying the seat between them. Waiting.

He can hear the question echo in his bones: _which one of you will it be?_

**_ _**

 

He was born different. During a storm, his mother says. His abuela always insists that doesn’t mean anything. Signs, superstitions. Nothing more. Storms don’t herald what is in his blood. It came quietly and it lingers, just beneath the surface where no one else can see.

He can feel it there, though, from as early as he can remember. A force, a power that doesn’t have a name.

Through it the entire earth echoes.

 

**_ _**

 

It’s still mostly dark when they taxi into the airport, the sky just beginning to lighten at the edges. The air is thick and cloying and he can smell the sea as soon as he descends the ramp. He breathes it in deep, lets it rattle around in his lungs. Ian pulls him forward with a bruising grip on his arm and he stumbles, shoes catching on the puckered tarmac.

Ian’s fingers dig deep enough to ache against bone. “C’mon, Rubes, keep up.”

Death trails half a step behind.

_Which one of you will it be?_

**_ _**

 

The force lets him manipulate the world around him. He can’t explain it, only that he can reach into something—a rock, a tree, the ground beneath his feet—and _change_ it. Pull parts of it away and make them into something new. Like a strange kind alchemy.

 _Magia,_ his abuela calls it, holding his shaking hands in her calloused ones. _Can you feel it, mijo?_

And he can: a current running through everything. The earth, his abuela, his own pulsing veins. It presses against his ribs, echoes in each beat of his heart—endless, ancient yet somehow trapped beneath his fragile skin.

 _You father had it,_ his abuela tells him. _I have it. And now, so do you._

He asks where it came from and she doesn’t have an answer. Says there are some things too old to remember, too vast to comprehend.

They just _are._ And you must simply _be._

 

**_ _**

Ian hustles him through passport control and then back out into the tropical dawn, ignoring his protests and requests to pick up his suitcase.

He raises an arm to hail a taxi on the curb and gives Ruben his sharp, shark-like smile. Ruben can practically see the blood between his teeth. “Trust me, you won’t need it.”

“What are you going to do with me?” He asks, hating the way his voice trembles and cracks on each word.

“I figured first I’d find us a nice private place to chat.” He squeezes Ruben’s arm in a mockery of affection. “Don’t get ahead of yourself.”

Ruben wants to laugh. Scream. Rend the world apart.

Instead, he gets in the cab and does his best to ignore Ian’s proprietary hand on his knee—the searing heat of it through the denim of his jeans, like a brand.

Death breaths ice against the back of his neck. Sings low in his ear. _Which one? Which one?_

**_ _**

 

His mother is afraid of him, of what he can do. Takes him aside when he is ten years old and makes him promise to hide this away, as deep inside of him as he can force it to go.

 _It’s dangerous,_ she says. _It’s the reason your father is gone._

She will never tell him _why,_ and that frustrates him. But he hates the fear he can see in her eyes, and that is worse. He doesn’t want to hurt anyone, especially his mother or his sisters, both blessedly normal, so he learns to hide. He makes himself quiet, invisible. He ignores the hum in his bones—that current he can sometimes taste on the air, that crackle of power capable of shifting _mountains_ were he to let it.

He cultivates normality like a meticulously designed garden: clothes just a little too big to make him seem smaller; a disarming smile; a brain that is smart, brilliant, even, but never unnatural. He studies chemistry because it as close as he can come—a step to the left of magic, but still in the same realm of molecules and matter and elements and change. He gets a modest apartment and a job in a lab. He pairs striped ties with plaid shirts and wears beat up sneakers because it makes him seem non-threatening.

His mother encourages him every step. Keeps warning him to _hide it, hide it. You can’t let anyone see, mijo._

It becomes a mantra: hide, _hide_. Head down. Be normal. Nothing to see here.

It becomes easy.

But a part of him, the part that has never quite been human—that belongs to something else, something _more—_ always aches. Sharp. Like a knife. Like dying—drowning slow.

Water creeping closer and closer to his lungs.

 

  **_ _**

 

The taxi takes them out of the city. He watches it fade, watches cane fields unfold in an endless sea of green and the mountains that blot the horizon draw steadily closer. The fear is still there, choking him, tangling his words, settled like a ball of lead in the pit of his stomach.

“I had a hotel,” he murmurs, pointlessly.

Ian laughs. “I have a different place in mind.”

He’s carrying a gun. Ruben hasn’t seen it but he _knows_ with the same certainty he knows the sky is blue.

“Where are you taking me?” He tries.

Ian pats his cheek roughly. “Patience.”

The taxi stops at the end of a dirt road winding into the cane—a thin brown trail to the mountains.

“We’re walking from here,” Ian says and presses a wad of change into the driver’s hands. Gives him that sick, charming smile. “Thank you.”

Ruben chooses the moment of distraction the throw himself out of the cab. He trips, nearly faceplants into the dirt, but manages to get his feet under him and _run._ Maybe he can lose Ian in the cane, then double back. They passed some houses a few miles ago, maybe…

A hand snags the back of his shirt, wrenching him to a stop. He hits the ground—the impact punching all the air out of his lungs. Ian looms over him. The taxi is gone. It’s just them and cane and dizzying blue sky.

“Ruben, Ruben, Ruben,” Ian chides and plants a foot in his stomach. Something cracks— _rib, more than one?—_ and Ian grabs his shirt when he tries to curl up into a ball. Hauls him to his knees. “Why do you always make things harder on yourself?”

Ruben pants through the pain, his own breaths loud in his ringing ears. His whole body aches and he’s so, so tired. He’s been tired for years.

Ian is going to put a bullet in his head in the middle of a cane field.

 _You could kill him,_ a voice whispers from the depths of him. The part of him where the power sleeps. _It would be easy._

There’s no one for miles. The earth is humming beneath him, the current waiting for him to dip his fingers in.

It would be so, so easy. Pathetically, hilariously easy.

He closes his eyes and lets Ian force him back to his feet. Shove him forward. “Walk.”

 _Which one?_ Death hums between the rippling cane stalks. _Which one?_

He walks.  

 

**_ _**

 

 _There are only two constants in this world, mijo,_ his abuela tells him when he’s fifteen, not long before he loses her. _Death and change. And both of them will haunt you._

Death and change—opposite sides of the same coin. Bound by fate.

He seems them everywhere in his life, but rarely intertwined so thoroughly as they are in Jason Cole.

He suspects, early on, that there is no real cure for what Jason is suffering. His abuela would have called it a curse—magic corrupted and twisted, gone wrong. Perhaps Jason and Ian were two souls combined into one body. Perhaps they are dissonant parts of the same person. Perhaps it is simply anomalous brain chemistry.

He doesn’t know and he has never been able to back down from a challenge.

It’s risky. He knows that, too. Not because both Ian and Jason are dangerous in their different ways, but because it is a deviation from his careful normality. But then there is his heart, which has always been far weaker than his mind. Which caves and wilts in the face of praise, respect, and a smile matched with brilliant blue eyes.

It’s pathetic, stupid. Going to get him killed. Or if not killed, undone. Exposed.

_(Head down. Nothing to see.)_

He makes drugs for Jason. He lies to his mother.

Deep within him, something ancient stirs.

 

**_ _**

 

Ian takes him to a house at the foot of a mountain. It’s cheerful yellow paint is peeling and the floorboards of the porch are weathered by rain and time, groaning loud beneath his dusty feet when Ian drags him up them.

“Friend of a friend,” Ian explains, taking a key out of his pocket. “Old vacation home. Hasn’t been used in years.”

The door opens with a moan. The air inside is full of dust particles, dancing in the light beams streaming through the slatted blinds. They coat the inside of Ruben’s mouth, making him cough.

“Figured this would be the perfect place for our talk,” Ian continues.

The lock clicks loud in the room. Ruben thinks about crying, but can’t muster the energy for tears.

“I told you,” he says as Ian stalks towards him, inevitable as the tide. “I don’t know how to make the drug work!”

“Wrong answer,” Ian says and backhands him across the face.

He staggers, chokes on a sob of pain. Ian grabs a fistful of his hair and yanks his head back. “You know what I think? I think you’ve already figured it out. Or you will. It’s only a matter of time, isn’t it?”

“No,” Ruben rasps to the cobwebbed ceiling. “I’ve tried everything. I can’t make it work. I can’t, I can’t…”

Ian strips off his shirt, handcuffs him, and throws him in a rickety chair in the middle of the nearly empty room. Paces in front of him like a caged tiger while he struggles to regain his equilibrium. He can’t seem to get his lungs working right.

“Why are you protecting him? You think he _cares_ about you? Would come looking for you?” Ian crouches in front of him and looks up at him with what is almost genuine sympathy. “When are you going to get it through your head that he’s not your friend? You mean nothing to him.”

 _And to you?_ Ruben wants to ask, but realizes that he'd rather not know.

“This isn’t about him.” That much is true. He doesn’t care about Jason Cole anymore, stopped the moment he decided to choose himself for the first time in years and ran like hell.

For all the good it did him.

Ian arches a disbelieving eyebrow at him. “Then you’re willing to die for him?”

Ah. There’s the gun. And a scalpel from the hospital, glinting in the afternoon sunlight. He feels a renewed tremor of fear but it dies quickly. He’s so fucking tired.

“No,” he mumbles. “I just don’t want to kill anyone.”

But it would be so easy. So, so easy.

Pathetically, hilariously…

 

_ _

 

Ian starts with the scalpel. He doesn’t have Jason’s precision or training. He cuts too deep in places, too wide—stabs the blade in so far that Ruben can almost feel it touching bone. It’s messy, blood all over the rotting floor, and it _hurts._

He didn’t think anything could hurt this much.

Ian is impervious to his screams, to the tears that finally start falling, wetting his cheeks and dripping onto his lap. It’s an eternity, an age, before he finally stops.

“Tell me how to make the drug.”

Ruben sobs for air, agony in every part of him. He thinks about his mother and sisters back home, about his abuela, about the power he can still feel rattling against his ribcage, about death and change and the bullet Ian is going to put in his head as soon as he says the right words.

He thinks about his lonely, quiet, _normal_ life in Philly and if he can go back to it. Or if all this blood and pain and chaos has altered him irreversibly.

Does any of it matter anymore? Did it ever matter to begin with?

Ian puts the scalpel to his neck. Presses in hard enough to draw blood. One slash to the right and it's over. “C’mon, Ruben. Hasn’t this gone on long enough? Just tell me what I need to know and we can be on the next flight back to Philly.”

 _I want to live_ , he thinks frantically as the scalpel digs deeper and black spots blur the edges of his vision. He wants to live. Even if he can never go back. Even if nothing will ever be the same again. He wants to _live._

“Titanium,” he whispers with something like grief. “You need titanium. It’s all in my notebook. I mailed it to Jason before we took off.”

Ian laughs, pleased, and pats his cheek. “There. See? That wasn’t so bad, was it, Rubes?”

He undoes the handcuffs. Doesn’t reach for the gun. Ruben stands on shaking legs and Ian lets him put his shirt back on. The fabric clings to the wounds on his back and arms and his fingers are trembling too hard to do up the buttons. He feels empty—numb where he was hoping for triumph, plagued by the inescapable sense that this isn’t over yet.

Ian guides him back outside into the glare of the sun. Steadies him when he trips down the porch steps. They pause there, between the house and the road and the cane.

A familiar _click._

Ruben closes his eyes. “You’re not going to take me back.”

“No,” Ian says. “I told you, Ruben. You’re a sneaky cat. Can’t be trusted. Though the look on your face when I let you up … I’m going to cherish that.”

Something deep inside Ruben cracks open.

He wants to _live,_ goddamnit.

“And I told you,” he says, amazed at the renewed steadiness in his voice. “I don’t need a drug to kill you.”

He throws himself forward. The gun goes off—a bright burst of pain in his side that he ignores. His mind is on the roar of the current and when he lands on his hands and knees in the dirt, he reaches for it. Pulls it from the rocks in the cane fields, the dead wood of the house, the grains of earth beneath his fingers. Twists it, changes it, until he has a hovering field of weapons—points as sharp as the scalpel Ian peeled him open with.

His own strange alchemy.

Ian shouts in alarm. Dirt crunches beneath his boot when he backs up a frantic step. Ruben stands on still-shaking legs and presses a hand to his bleeding side.

The whole earth is echoing, he can hear it, feel it. In his marrow and his blood.

Death and change.

“What is this?” Ian demands and for the first time, Ruben hears _fear_ in his voice.

He wants to savor it, but there is still too much grief flooding the crevices of his chest, aching. 

“Like you said. Survival. Whatever it takes, right?”

Ian stares at him—the same fear he always saw in his mother’s eyes now radiating out of the familar blue. He looks like Jason did just yesterday, begging for help, for a cure. For more of Ruben’s time and effort and sacrifice.

The grief sharpens. He never wanted this, asked for this. He feels dark and terrible and monstrous and alive.

He just wants all of this to be _over._

“Leave me alone,” he says. “Leave my family alone. Find your cure somewhere else.”

Ian glances at the hovering shards—metal spun from earth. Ruben lets them creep closer, drives Ian back another step. “Understand?”

“How are you _doing_ this?” Ian demands. “What _is this?_ What _are_ you?”

Another inch. “ _Do you_ _understand?”_

Ian looks back at him and everything slows down. Freezes. The very air around them holding its breath. Ruben waits for the nod, the surrender. Survival, Ian said, and surely, he knows what that means, what is now required.

But the fear is changing, morphing into rage, and Ruben sees with sudden, terrible clarity that it is not truly survival that motivates Ian, just as it is not truly sacrifice that motivates Jason.

Liars, both of them.

 _Which one?_ Death hisses. _Which one of you will it be?_

The gun comes up—Ian’s finger hovering over the trigger. Ruben raises his hand. The current moves, hurls the metal forward, and then it’s over. Ian’s body hits the earth in a cloud of dust and Ruben falls after him, crashing back to his knees.

Oh God, oh God, oh God...

He vomits, hacking up blood and bile. The humid air is thick enough to choke on, heavy in his lungs, and he can feel the sun pressing hot against his ruined back. Everything is too still. Like all the life has suddenly gone out of the world.

He hears an echo of his mother’s voice from long ago. _“It’s dangerous, mijo.”_

He can never go back to playing pretend, to being normal. He … he _killed_ … and now that vast, ancient, unknowable thing won’t be shoved down or sealed over. It hums and sings and roars, inevitable as the tide.

He vomits again. Shakes. Swallows back the sob crawling up his throat.

He still wants to live. God help him. He's going to live. 

 

_ _

 

His family is from Puerto Rico, but his abuela spent her last years in Montego Bay. Said she liked Jamaica better, that this island had superior beaches. But he knew it was because of the magic in the air, stronger here than back home. He could taste it whenever he came to visit her, mixed with the salt of the sea.

She’s buried outside the city. At a church by the shore.

When he stood in the middle of the graveyard and closed his eyes, he could hear her voice on the ocean wind, feel her alongside the magic and it was too much for his weak, soft heart to handle.

He hasn’t been back since the funeral.

 

_ _

 

He buries Ian ( _Jason)_ in the cane field. Opens up a tear in the earth and sinks his body deep inside.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers to the unmarked grave, wishing he had tears to accompany the pain hollowing him out breath by breath. “I’m so sorry.”

He’s not sure who he’s apologizing to. Jason? His mother? Himself? All of the above?

Does it even matter? Words won’t fix this.

_ _

 

He bandages his wounds with strips of the dusty sheets in the house and staggers back to the main road. Makes it to the houses he saw what feels like a lifetime ago and convinces a family there to drive him back to the city.

Though, it doesn’t take much convincing. All he does is sway on his feet and beg them, voice breaking to, “ _Please,_ please help me.”

They take him to a shabby doctor’s office in the outskirts. A nurse stitches up his wounds, wraps him in real bandages, and asks if they need to call the police.

“No,” he tells her and checks himself out.

He still has his wallet, somehow, and he buys a new shirt from a nearby vendor. It’s a tacky Hawaiian one—all bright floral colors—and he wants to laugh. Scream. Cry some more.

At least no one will find him remotely threatening.

He thinks about calling his mother. His phone screen is cracked, but it still works. What will he say, though? How can he confess the enormity of all of this? Of what he’s _done_?

Opening with: _“your worst nightmare about me came true”_ doesn’t sound appealing.

So he pockets the phone, tells himself _later,_ and goes to the church by the sea.

 

_ _

 

He can still feel her. In the air, in the earth—a lingering ghost on the wind that sweeps across the too-tranquil ocean.

He misses her, bone deep. Wants desperately to ask her for advice, if she ever got blood on her hands and had to reconcile it. _Can_ it be reconciled? Or is this the price of such terrible power?

But she is silent. And she was never one for concrete answers when she was alive, either. He’s still not sure if it was wisdom or cowardice that drove her—compelled her to leave things for him to figure out on his own.

Perhaps his mother’s influence. Or his father’s, before he vanished.

He still sits by her grave and watches boat lights dance on the waves. When the sun starts to rise, he goes down to the beach, to the very edge of the shore. The sky is a painting of red and gold and blue and the magic is strong—empowered by the ever-moving tides.

He strips off his shoes and socks, rolls up his dirty jeans, and wades in. Stops when the water is brushing his knees. His body aches, but his blood is singing, singing.

He can feel all of his bridges burning—IMH, the lab, the modest apartment, the disarming smile, the plaid and stripes. He can hear the world echo in his ribcage, next to thrum of grief that will linger and linger and linger.

He is monstrous, bloodstained, terrible, and whole. He is alive.

He can’t go back, doesn’t _want_ to. What he has become, what he has always been, cannot fathom it. He’ll have to find a new path, a different way to reconcile all of these different pieces of him. The normality and the power. The chemist and the alchemist.

Simple, tired Ruben Mercado with whatever ancient, unknown magic moves in his veins.

He puts a hand in the water, feels the pull of the tide against his skin, beckoning him forward.

He hopes Jason is at peace, just as he knows he will never be.

Death and change.

He was born in a storm.

 

_ _

 

 _“And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it.”_  

  **Roald Dahl**


End file.
